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Anika Altaf

From 2007 onwards, the PADev (Participatory Assessment of Development) research project started to focus on the assessment of development interventions from the perception of recipients in Burkina Faso and Ghana. One of the most important and striking conclusions of this study was its failure to reach the poor and the very poor, meaning that the bulk of interventions were not reaching these groups. Development organizations thus have to struggle with the question about whether to adjust their current targeting practices or to redefine their target groups.
Anika Altaf is working at the ASC on her PhD on how to target the ultra poor in poverty-alleviation initiatives. Her research aims to discover how extremely poor people can benefit on a long-term basis from such actions. In addition, she is attempting to find out who the ultra poor are and the struggles they face. Her research is being carried out in Bangladesh, Benin and Ethiopia using the PADev methodology and she is trying to connect Asian experiences (in a country where NGOs are experimenting with and developing methods to reach the ultra poor) with African experiences.

Prof. Ton Dietz, the Director of the African Studies Centre, is supervising this research project with Dr Nicky Pouw from the University of Amsterdam. The research is funded by Woord & Daad.
Prior to working on her PhD, Anika completed her Masters degree in International Development Studies at the International School for Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Amsterdam. She has conducted fieldwork and research in Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, Burkina Faso and Pakistan and is a member of the PADev research team.